The Hollow Cross

The Hollow Cross is a long social-mystery novel by Keigo Higashino exploring the death penalty and the nature of crime and punishment. Nakahara Michimasa and his wife Sayoko's only daughter, Manami, is killed by a burglar, and after many appeals the couple finally sees the killer, Kazuo Hirukawa, sentenced to death. Yet the killer feels no remorse for the death penalty—he merely finds the appeals troublesome—and the verdict brings the bereaved couple no comfort; their hollowed-out marriage ends in divorce, and Sayoko moves back to her parents' home, each living on in their own grief. Years later, Michimasa receives a call from a detective and learns that Sayoko has been murdered. The killer soon turns himself in, and it looks like a simple case, but while sorting through her belongings Michimasa discovers that Sayoko had been investigating something before her death, and her murder seems to have another story behind it. The novel then opens a second thread: as teenagers, Nishina Fumiya and Iguchi Saori committed an irreversible wrong in a moment of impulse. They were never held to account by the law, yet they have spent more than twenty years punishing themselves: Fumiya became a pediatrician, doing his utmost to save young lives; Saori believes she does not deserve to live and is long crushed by self-reproach. The two timelines gradually converge through the investigation: on one side the emptiness after a death sentence, on the other a burden voluntarily borne by those whom the law never punished. Through the collapse of several families, Higashino asks unanswerable questions—is it enough for the condemned to hear the death sentence? Is it equally possible to return to society and atone with one's whole life?—pointing toward the image in the title: punishment is like a cross, and whether it can truly bear crime and punishment may in the end be "hollow."